Thursday, June 20, 2013

Singapore PSI levels hit an all time high of 321 last night. This was the 10pm reading. Other than the seriousness of the high number, this reading cause another stir. This 10pm reading was released very near to 11pm. Normally the readings are released within 5 minutes, so why was the 10pm reading last night so special?

This is taken from the NEA website last night. You can see the 10pm reading is 321.

This was uploaded by someone who claim that he saw this just before it got removed. This fuels the imaginations of a lot of people. A lot of people are saying that the PSI level is too high and the authorities do not want us to see it, and thus the delay.

I beg to differ. If we look at the 9pm reading, we can see that it's 290. It's already the highest we ever have. PSI levels above 200 are very unhealthy and PSI above 300 are hazardous. What do you think people will do when they see the PSI level at 290 at 9pm? All of them are going to be refreshing on the NEA PSI page at 10pm! So what happens when everyone keeps refreshing that page? The server can't handle the load and we get this:

Now we can see that the server can't handle the high load and crashes at 10pm. So what happens after that? The IT engineers will be trying to resolve this. And it takes time. They took about 1 hour to resolve this, which I think is a reasonable time.

So for this case, I doubt there's much conspiracy going around.

However, this morning the PSI reading was 122 at 8am and 131 at 9am. Look at this picture taken at 9+am.

And this picture is taken yesterday at about 2+pm where the PSI is about 170.

Now I don't have a logical explanation for this. May the conspiracy theories fly!

Update:
There's no conspiracy after all. The NEA hourly PSI reading is using the PM10 reading. It doesn't account for the smaller PM2.5 particles. See this link for more info.